After 111,768 words and a couple weeks of sleepless nights, the draft manuscript is off to the publisher! ... who will be quick to remind me that the plan was 100k words for us to edit down to 70k. We'll see how that goes; the way I write, we can probably hit that target by deleting unnecessary adverbs alone.

I've been keeping the online draft up-to-date with the unified manuscript, so you can keep up with all the changes and refinements as we move forward.

The Style Guide

Part of the job of putting the manuscript together is assembling the style guide to go with it, and wow. The style guide was a week of work by itself. I've copied some excerpts here so you can see the behind-the-scenes magic. 

You wouldn't think that putting together a couple-page summary of game terms and style choices would be so tough, but the rulebook is a mishmash of 25 years of competing style decisions and inconsistent terminology. Most of the work of assembling the manuscript has been painstakingly bringing three hundred pages of competing styles into alignment with the unified styleguide. Now, according to the plan, the publisher will hand it off to the in-house line editor and they'll come back and tell me how many errors I missed.

Tanks For Everything

(Natalya's Assyrian Vanquisher:  https://brikwars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6115 )

A new addition to the rulebook is one I've been trying to write for years: the Special Tanks chapter. So many hundreds of people have helped this project along in big and small ways over the past couple of decades. I know I can't list everybody, but I tried to at least get a representative sample.

One thing I still want to add is a special page just for all the Patreon supporters current and past. For that, I'm going to need to track everybody down and find out how they'd like to be listed, whether under their real name ("Karen Anderson"), community handle ("Skullviper Deathblade Razorstorm"), or both ("Karen 'Skullviper Deathblade Razorstorm' Anderson"), or some other random thing entirely ("@icecreamlover592").

It doesn't look like Patreon has any easy way to poll everybody for their preferred names, so it looks like I'll have to contact everybody individually and start putting a spreadsheet together as we move forward.